‘Sister Carrie’ leaves the mean streets of Chicago for Paris in Daniel Nearing’s bold premiere, now with a live orchestra at Siskel Film Center

“I read ‘Sister Carrie’ when I was 18 or 19 and thought it was terrible,” says filmmaker and professor Daniel Nearing. Then he picked it up again in his 50s. “And in the intervening years,” he says, chuckling, “Theodore Dreiser had somehow matured as an author.”

Traditionalists be warned: While you’d be wise to attend one of the world premiere screenings of the Nearing version of “Sister Carrie” this weekend at the Gene Siskel Film Center, you’d be a dope to expect a straightforward adaptation of the 1900 masterpiece of social realism. He doesn’t work that way. He’s a steadfast impressionist, a poet, not a prose man.

Nearing’s latest feature rounds out a hypnotic trilogy of Chicago films and Chicago stories, begun with “Chicago Heights” (2010), a relocation and reimagining of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” stories. The trilogy continued five years later with “Hogtown,” graced like its predecessor with beautiful black-and-white images bridging history and poetic imagination.

“Sister Carrie” presents Nearing’s latest and, in many ways, riskiest and most evocative exercise in working “period-less” (his word). It is only partly indebted to the novel of its title. Dreiser was inspired by great French romantic tragedians who had a habit of confining their tragic heroines to victim status, “without much agency,” Nearing says.

That got him rethinking the notion of adapting Dreiser with relative fidelity, which he tried, but … 400 pages later, the results with his co-writer Sabrina Doyle felt sludgy. And they hadn’t solved the issue of making Carrie, the Wisconsin farm girl braving the mean streets of Chicago and beyond, an agent of her own story.

So “Sister Carrie” pulls narrative threads and ideas from three other sources: Anderson’s short story “Brothers”; Alexandre Dumas’ “La Dame aux Camélias”; and Antoine François Prévost’s downfall saga “The Story of Manon Lescaut.” In the film, which, true to Nearing’s recent form, runs just over an hour, Carrie — played with eloquent concentration by Eve Rydberg — drives one man, her factory foreman (Cameron Knight), to murder for love barely requited.

Then, instead of New York City from the novel, Carrie is whisked off by Unlucky Man #2 (played by Joffrey Ballet star Fabrice Calmels) to Paris for the second act of her societally thwarted life.

The results, Nearing hopes, have a way of “calling out centuries of romantic literature where women who were ostensibly the protagonists were, in fact, victims of their authors.”

Nearing works methodically, with more time than money. He began filming footage for transitional sequences, in Greece, Italy and Montreal, Canada, in 2016. The Paris footage came in 2018. Then he filmed the last of the prison-set footage of the factory foreman, played by Knight, in Crown Point, Indiana, in late November — less than three weeks ago.

Chicago footage includes scenes set in downtown Chicago alleys; gracefully eccentric pinhole-camera images of Carrie arriving in Union Station; and, in a dance sequence filmed under the Tiffany Dome in the Chicago Cultural Center, 25 “alternate Carries”, heightening the longing for freedom the main characters in this dreamscape cannot attain.

All that beauty deserves a rich musical score, and “Sister Carrie” has it. Composer Paul Bhasin, whose work is joined on the soundtrack by compositions provided by co-star Calmels, met Nearing when Bhasin worked at Triton College in River Grove. The composer and conductor is now at Emory University in Georgia, and as with his score composed for “Hogtown,” the “Sister Carrie” soundtrack is full of piquant melody and subterranean ache.

For three of this weekend’s Film Center screenings, Bhasin will lead a live 12-person ensemble in the accompaniment to what is, largely, a silent movie. (The film’s recorded soundtrack bumps the Emory University Symphony Orchestra size up to 70 in some places.)

“My films,” Nearing says, “are kind of tendentiously bleak, as you may have noticed.” (I have, but I like them.) Composer Bhasin, he says, has “a way of elevating them, with a gentleness and empathy regardless of the harshness of the characters, or their circumstances.” With “Sister Carrie” you won’t be getting the Dreiser edition. But then, the Dreiser edition has existed for 122 years. The world can accommodate a cinematic riff that goes its own way in search of everything Carrie wanted: truth, beauty, love and its own way of telling a story.

“Sister Carrie” at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. Director Daniel Nearing and cast members present for all showings; more at siskelfilmcenter.org.

6:30 p.m. Dec. 16 in a Film Center 50th anniversary benefit presentation with live 12-piece orchestra and Champagne reception, “Art Film Formal” dress code of “black T-shirt to black tie”; tickets $25-$50.

4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Dec. 17, both with live orchestral score (6:30 p.m. screening is followed by a Champagne reception; “Art Film Formal” dress code). Then 2 p.m. Dec. 18 and 6:30 p.m. Dec. 20; tickets $6-$12.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune

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